LEV893 Kashrut: To Identify with the Feelings of Animals and Inspire Hesitation about Eating Meat. Rav Kook teaches with great passion that the rules of kashrut should inspire in us a sort of guilt about eating meat. Before the Great Flood, humanity is vegetarian. Permission to eat meat is understood by our tradition to be a sort of concession to our violent appetites, which become all too evident by the time of Noah. “The commandments came to regulate the eating of meat, and steps that will take us to the higher purpose.... These actions will bear fruit and ultimately educate mankind. The mute protest will, when the time is ripe, be transformed into a mighty shout and succeed in its aim. The very nature of the principles of ritual slaughter, with their specific rules and regulations designed to reduce pain, create the atmosphere that you are not dealing with things outside the law, that they are not automatons devoid of life, but living beings. (Abraham Isaac Kook, “Fragments of Light: A View as to the Reasons for the Commandments” 318-9). The concept is not new: Rambam, two, speaks of tzaar baalei chayim, understanding the pain of all living creatures. We are instructed not to slaughter an animal and its young on the same day (Leviticus 22:28), “for in these cases animals feel very great pain, there being no difference regarding this pain between man and the other animals. For the love and the tenderness of a mother for her child is not consequent of one reason, but upon the activity of the imaginative faculty, which is found in most animals just as it is found in man.” Maimonides, Guide 3:48. Ibn Ezra argues that this prohibition, along with a warning not to take a mother bird and her eggs, teach sensitivity to life. Although he insists that their complete reasons for kashrut are concealed, it is clear that boiling a kid in its mother's milk would be cruel. (Exodus 23:19, Deut. 22:6). Sensitivity, it seems, comes in several gradations. While the vegetarian movement continues apace, Rav Kook describes that practice as messianic, to be achieved after we have mastered more basic objectives, such as world peace. Torah offers a gradualness for those whose carnivorous drives cannot be fully subdued. Kook folklore tells us that the Rav himself ate meat once a week, chicken on Erev Shabbat, as a sign that we had not yet arrived. On route, however, there are choices we can make that extend our sensitivity to animal life: we can refuse to eat veal--baby calves with their feet chained to the side of a stall their entire lives so they will not stand up or wander around and spoil that tender flesh. We can buy nest eggs, so the chickens do not have to live their lives in tiny cages just so we can have scrambled eggs in the morning. We can seek out milk from cows that have not been given growth hormones, which cause increased infection and discomfort for the animals. Traditional kashrut certainly limits the amount of meat we consume, since we do not eat meat “out” except in kosher restaurants. The separation of meat and milk can prompt us to be conscious of the sources of our food, and the price paid to bring it to our table. Contemporary expansion of the principles would further advance our appreciation of tzaar baalei chayim. (By Rachel S. Mikva, “Adventures in Eating: An Emerging Model for Kashrut”)